Barack Obama's campaign for president came to New York City yesterday, and one of the remarkable things was that Washington Square Park was jammed with an estimated 7,000 people, even though the campaign doesn't have headquarters or an organization in the city to this point. That's no mean feat--this is a city on the go, lots to do, a baseball team in a pennant race--and on a Thursday night, which as everyone knows has become the new Friday. So how did they manage it?
Obama's campaign is run Enterprise 2.0-style and thus understands the power of user-generated content, is how. Before Obama even spoke, Temo Figueroa, his national field director, took the stage and asked folks to take out their cell phones and text a message to the Obama campaign. Once they've done that, he said, "you can talk to us and ask us questions, and we can talk to you."
I don't think anyone is naive enough to believe that Obama himself will answer every message personally, or that every message will be taken seriously. But the campaign does understand the power of user-generated content and makes use of it in a number of ways; for example, e-mail solicitations include messages from other donors who address recipients and invite them to a dialog, and of course to contribute money.
Obama might have been talking tactics instead of policy when he said, "change comes from the bottom up."
He sounded less like a typical grass-roots, commune-loving activist, and a lot more like a modern business executive who knows his company's best ideas and competitive advantage will come bubbling up through the ranks, not concocted by a high-level brain trust that pours its ideas into the organization like cod liver oil into a funnel stuck in the company gullet. He sounded a lot, in fact, like Cisco CEO John Chambers. And listening to Obama, I wondered how long it would be until every politician operated like the forward-looking CEOs.
The elections are fast approaching, with significant consequences for the tech industry, with issues ranging from net neutrality to health care reform looming before us. We've already looked into Hillary Clinton's technology platform and will run profiles on other candidates' tech-related views as the elections approach.
But I've no doubt that, in the coming months, we're going to see more campaigns adopt more Web 2.0 technologies and approaches. To reprise an old dictum, the next revolution will be user-generated.